Springwood: The Hudson River Home That Made Franklin D. Roosevelt

Springwood is the only place in the United States where a president was born, kept a lifelong connection, and lies buried. Franklin Delano Roosevelt grew up in the house on a bluff above the Hudson River, regained his strength there after polio, accepted nominations from its portico, received kings and prime ministers in its rooms, and asked to be buried in its Rose Garden.

The grounds of Springwood today, from the house to the Roosevelt Library. National Park Service.

Springwood, faced in stucco and fieldstone since 1915. Credit: NPS.

A boyhood on the Hudson

Roosevelt was born at Springwood, the family estate in Hyde Park, New York, on January 30, 1882. Both he and his mother nearly died during the birth; she could have no more children, and he grew up a protected only child in a family of wealth and social position. His father, James Roosevelt — "Mr. James" to villagers who respected his work in local government — taught him horsemanship, rowing, fishing, sailing and ice boating, and introduced him to public affairs. His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, supervised his tutoring and his manners.

James died in 1900, during Franklin's first term at Harvard, and Sara owned Springwood until her own death there in September 1941. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, married in 1905, shared the house with her and raised their five children there. A family friend and neighbor, Olin Dows, observed that Roosevelt's dealings with his neighbors taught him that even a world problem came down to a personal one: he said he wrote his fireside chat on the banking crisis for his old friends in Dutchess County.

The house he remade

James Roosevelt had bought a clapboard farmhouse in the mid-19th-century Italian style in 1867. Franklin, an amateur architect, kept proposing changes, and his mother usually refused them. In 1915 they finally worked with a New York City architectural firm to enlarge it into a stucco-and-fieldstone mansion in an early American style, with new wings, updated electrical service, new plumbing and room for a growing family. The only other major change in Sara's lifetime was the presidential library. After her death, Roosevelt allowed nothing in the house or its furnishings to change. His taste for Dutch colonial fieldstone spread to Hyde Park's public schools and post office and to Eleanor's nearby retreat, Val-Kill.

Polio, and the walk to the gate

In 1920 Roosevelt ran for vice president with James M. Cox and lost to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge by seven million votes. On July 27, 1921, he visited a Boy Scout camp at Bear Mountain State Park, then joined his family at Campobello Island, New Brunswick. On August 10 he fell feverish and over several days lost the use of his legs. It was polio, possibly caught at the camp. He was spared complete paralysis, but never walked again without assistance.

His mother wanted him to retire to Hyde Park. Eleanor, his doctor and his political advisor Louis Howe agreed with him that he should not. Howe coached Eleanor into public life in 1922, and she became her husband's eyes, ears and legs — speaking to, among others, the women who had voted for the first time in 1920.

That spring Roosevelt moved to Springwood to recover. He took prescribed walks down the quarter-mile gravel drive to the Albany Post Road (U.S. Route 9) on crutches and 14 pounds of metal braces, moving his legs with his upper body, a little further each day until he reached the gateposts. Later he thought the exercise had probably done him more harm than good. For seven years he pursued therapy — New York City, Hyde Park, Florida and finally Warm Springs, Georgia — interrupted in 1924 by his "Happy Warrior" speech nominating Governor Al Smith for president. Frances Perkins, later the first woman in a presidential cabinet, wrote that the illness transformed him and taught him to understand people in trouble.

In 1928 Smith, running for president against Herbert Hoover, needed Roosevelt to run for governor and hold New York's 45 electoral votes. Roosevelt wanted to keep working on his legs and dodged Smith's letters, telegrams and calls. When he took a call from Eleanor on Smith's behalf, the choice was made.

Governor, then president

Hyde Park, on the Hudson between New York City and Albany. National Park Service.

In 1910 he gave his first acceptance speech from Springwood's portico, a scene repeated at every election after. As governor he faced the Depression: between 1930 and 1932 the number of unemployed Americans rose from four million to 12 million. He backed state unemployment insurance, better workers' compensation and hydroelectric power to bring affordable electricity to rural New York. "Clearly it is a duty of government in an emergency to prevent any man, woman, or child from starving," he said in May 1932. Accepting the Democratic nomination that summer, he pledged "a New Deal for the American People."

On election day, November 8, 1932, he voted at the Hyde Park Town Hall and chatted with townspeople, as was his custom. In the first hundred days, dozens of "alphabet agencies" followed:

• the Civilian Conservation Corps, putting young unemployed men aged 17 to 28 to work planting trees and fighting fires in national forests and parks;
• the Works Progress Administration, which built post offices, hospitals, roads, airports and schools, and employed artists, writers and musicians — forerunners of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts;
• the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose dams brought flood control and electricity to a poor valley stretching across seven southern states.

A WPA flood project in Louisville, Kentucky, 1937. Credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Roosevelt won a landslide in 1936, but Supreme Court decisions, weakening support in Congress and a sharp recession in 1937 set him back; full employment came only with the Second World War.

The world comes to Hyde Park

Roosevelt was the first modern president to use the media systematically, and he invited reporters to lunches, teas and dinners at his mother's house, much to her dismay. As war approached, Springwood became a stage. In June 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain visited, as if friends dropping by. The visit was designed to make them seem a likable, ordinary couple and to move a neutral, isolationist American public toward Britain, and newspapers covered it for more than a week.

On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt's annual message to Congress set out Lend-Lease and the Four Freedoms — of speech and expression, of worship, from want and from fear — and Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. Winston Churchill came to Springwood repeatedly during the war, riding through the woods and swimming at Val-Kill while the two leaders worked on military strategy, conference agendas and the shape of the postwar world. After the Cairo and Tehran conferences in December 1943, Roosevelt gave his Christmas Eve fireside chat from his study in the library beside the house.

He was elected to a third term in 1940, by five million votes over Wendell L. Willkie, and in 1944 ran for a fourth against the advice of his doctors, family and friends, winning by more than 3½ million votes over Thomas E. Dewey. "If the people command me to continue in this office and in this war," he said, "I have as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line."

Coming home

"All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River," Roosevelt said in July 1944. He hoped to retire to Springwood and work on his papers. Instead his health failed after the election, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945. At his own request he was buried in the Rose Garden at Springwood on April 15.

Springwood from the air. Credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

When the home was dedicated as a national historic site in 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt said that life there had always had a healing quality for him, and that he had hoped visitors might find something of the same rest and courage. The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site is on U.S. Route 9, six miles north of Poughkeepsie.

Sources

Based on "Springwood: Birthplace and Home to Franklin D. Roosevelt," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Charlotte Ofca Scholl, Park Ranger at Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Site, with the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, from the National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson draws on the National Register of Historic Places file for the site, Olin Dows's Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park (1949) and Frances Perkins's The Roosevelt I Knew (1946). Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.